Israel's attacks on Iran 'extraordinarily dangerous', says Harris
Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Harris has said that Israel's ongoing attacks on Iran are "extraordinarily dangerous" and could not be more serious.
It follows strikes across Iran by Israel, which Iran described as a "declaration of war".
Israel targeted Iranian nuclear facilities, ballistic missile factories and military commanders at the start of a prolonged operation Israel says is designed to prevent Tehran from building an atomic weapon.
Speaking on RTÉ's News at One, Mr Harris said there needs to be an immediate "de-escalation" in the region and called on both sides to "step back from the brink".
He said that the way forward is through negotiations.
The Tánaiste also said that no Irish citizens should travel to Israel in the wake of the attacks on Iran.
He said that this was an extension of advice that was already in place for Iran.
"We're keeping in close contact with our diplomatic teams on the ground in Iran and Israel, but I would ask all Irish citizens to heed that updated travel advice," he said.
Mr Harris said that Ireland had a diplomatic presence in Iran, and that Ireland was in regular contact with them.
He said that there was a small number of Irish citizens living in Iran.
"There are a small number of long-term residents in Iran who are Irish citizens, I think around 17 are known to us. We are keeping in very close contact with them too.
"But the change in advice today is please do not travel to Iran and Israel. This is an extraordinarily volatile and dangerous time, and I'd encourage all Irish citizens to heed that advice," he added.
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Irish Times
an hour ago
- Irish Times
‘It horrifies me, but I had actually developed a corporate strut': Fintan Drury on Anglo, Paddy Power and Gaza
Fintan Drury was marching in support of Palestine with one of his daughters last year, feeling the same distrust he felt during his 1980s stint as a presenter of RTÉ's Morning Ireland. 'I just sort of thought, well, I don't believe what we're being fed. I just don't believe it.' As Israel's onslaught on Gaza intensified, his participation in marches became more regular, and so did the sense that he could do something else to counter the official line coming from Israel. He rejects as 'patent nonsense' any perception that the conflict began with the Hamas attacks of October 7th, 2023. 'I thought there was more I could do if I got up off my ass and used my curious mind and my journalistic training.' READ MORE This was the catalyst for writing Catastrophe: Nakba II, his sober yet devastating account of Israel's treatment of Palestinians over decades. He says the subject is too important not to actively promote the book and that means being 'quizzed' by journalists, though he seems keen throughout our conversation to avoid coming across as egotistic – something that will not surprise readers of his 2021 memoir See-Saw, which dwells on the perils of ego. 'Sorry, it sounds sort of pompous,' he apologises soon after explaining how he was counselled to exhume his reporting skills in 2016. That year Drury wrote a series of articles for The Irish Times from his time as a volunteer at a Syrian refugee camp in Athens. It came after a long spell in the higher echelons of Irish corporate life during which he was, on occasion, the story. Indeed, so much of his career was spent in business that when he identifies journalism as the thing he was 'best at', the self-criticism is implied. Fintan Drury: 'I wasn't trying to be a hero; that wasn't my mission.' Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill Catastrophe opens with a note acknowledging that most books on Palestine and Israel are by authors with more extensive experience of the Middle East. Many are by 'absolutely brilliant minds', he says, but can be academic and dense. His aim, when he began working on it 'in a serious way' in April 2024, was to provide an accessible narrative 'so even the people who are out marching and protesting and wearing their keffiyehs – the people who are instinctively pro-Palestine – can better understand why they're protesting'. His research, which saw him travel to the West Bank, Jordan and Lebanon last July, helped confirm his own 'gut' feeling, though he didn't know then how extreme the situation would become. 'I didn't honestly believe at that time that it could be as bad as it is now. And it was bad then. Really, really bad.' Israel's aggression escalated while he was in the region, obliging him to call off one trip to southern Lebanon after a phone call with a contact in the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (Unifil). He was advised that an elevated security threat meant it would no longer be able to dedicate a minder. 'It's a bit like swimming when you're told not to, and the coastguard getting called out. You're putting other people at risk. I'm a grandfather. I wasn't trying to be a hero; that wasn't my mission, so I didn't go.' He has been heartened by the 'very positive' public reaction. At the Listowel Literary Festival, interest in Catastrophe was such that his talk was moved to a bigger room, though when someone asked him about solutions, he said he wasn't the right person to offer them. 'It is multifaceted, and it will ebb and flow and change,' he says. 'But the fundamental of the story is pretty clear to me and to a great many others who are there and studying it and observing it for decades. This is a genocide. All bets are off now. This is not right.' [ Britain and allies sanction two Israeli ministers as Gazan authorities say gunfire kills dozens at food aid site Opens in new window ] Authors often have more than one reason for writing a particular book and in his case there were several. Apart from the conflict itself, and the time being right for him to embark upon the project, he sees parallels with Ireland's colonisation that intersect with his own family story. Drury's maternal grandfather Joseph Connolly was a leader of the Irish Volunteers in Belfast who was imprisoned by the British in 1916 and resumed his republican activities in the city after his release. When it became too dangerous to stay, he fled with his wife and young family to Dublin. Connolly, who went on to serve twice as a minister under Éamon de Valera, died when Drury was two, but he knew his grandmother well, he says. 'My grandparents were displaced people. They were refugees from Belfast. Is that relevant? Absolutely, it's relevant. Because it's in your history. You understand that Catholics and nationalists who weren't able to get out continued to suffer.' Catastrophe – the Nakba of the subtitle refers, in the first instance, to the mass displacement of Palestinians in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war – is dedicated to the memory of his Belfast-born mother Róisín Drury, née Connolly. Their discussions about how the plight of Jewish people was shamefully ignored in the 1930s and 1940s would sometimes end with her relief that modern communications meant nothing like the Holocaust could ever happen again. There will be no credible basis for anyone to claim they did not understand what Israel was doing in Gaza or that they 'somehow missed it', he writes. The book documents an 'institutionalised bias' in the West towards Israel as the 'upholder of Western values' in the Middle East, with Drury despairing at both 'staggering' international inertia and 'chilling' sponsorship of Israel's campaign. He witnessed what he calls the 'warped' US policy first hand when he reported for RTÉ on Ronald Reagan's 1984 re-election and believes Democrats as well as Republicans have abandoned Palestinians. While Israel's prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu found it easy to 'play' the US in a presidential election year, he says the young mothers he met in Lebanon were livid that such a 'warmonger', as one described him, was permitted to address Congress. Ireland should be doing more, too, he concludes. 'I think Ireland has done many things really well, I really do, but has Ireland done enough? Time will tell, but right now I don't think so.' Drury (67) was born in Dublin and raised in Clonskeagh, then a 'sleepy part of south Dublin'. He attended Blackrock College and later UCD – its relocation to Belfield was an early taste of the city's encroachment on the fields of his youth. From 1981 to 1988 he was a newsman, joining RTÉ despite being told in a screen test that his head was 'shaped like a shovel'. He reported from Belfast and overseas before becoming the co-presenter of Radio 1's then fledgling Morning Ireland in 1985. But after just two-and-half years he grew restless and left broadcasting at age 29. It wasn't his plan to go into business, yet that's what he did, founding the public relations firm Drury Communications before selling it to its management a decade later to concentrate on his eponymous sports consultancy, which in 2004 rebranded as Platinum One. He became chairman of RTÉ in mid-2005 but resigned after six months when a perceived conflict of interest arose – over golf. The then government was flirting with adding the 2006 Ryder Cup, which was being held in Co Kildare, to its list of free-to-air television events, but Drury was an adviser to its organisers. Relinquishing the role was 'the right thing', he says. Does this all seem like a long time ago? 'It was a long time ago,' he says, laughing. It was that exact Celtic Tiger era, I say. 'Yeah.' These were hubristic times, as Drury outlines in See-Saw, which is laced with mea culpas about a 'sense of impregnability' borne of live news presenting and his PR and sports management success. It underpinned decisions that led, he writes, 'to a decade of stress that was degenerative of body and soul'. I had actually developed a corporate strut. When that becomes part of your way, you don't lose the capacity or the facility to make good judgments, but that capacity is dimmed or diminished — Fintan Drury After Anglo Irish Bank supremo Seán FitzPatrick persuaded him to join the Anglo board, he served as non-executive director for six years until May 2008, leaving six months before the bank failed. FitzPatrick's post-collapse recollection that Drury brought him and then taoiseach Brian Cowen together for a July 2008 meeting and round of golf did no one any favours, with Drury and Cowen, his friend, still being asked about it at an Oireachtas inquiry seven years later. (No banking was discussed that day, they said.) FitzPatrick's distraction-creating move convinced Drury of FitzPatrick's 'utter selfishness', he notes in the memoir. Cowen, meanwhile, remains a friend and was one of the early readers of Catastrophe. [ Fintan Drury: Brian Cowen put country first, party second Opens in new window ] I ask him about his realisation that when FitzPatrick said he wanted board members who would 'never be afraid' of expressing their opinion, he was flattering his ego. 'Yeah, and men, in particular, we're more susceptible to that,' he says. He mentions his use of the phrase 'corporate strut', which he suspects he acquired in those Anglo days. Fintan Drury: 'I was a good chairman in the sense that I helped [Paddy Power] grow. But I was horrified when I looked back.' Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill 'It horrifies me, and it would have horrified me before – it wasn't a conscious thing – but when I looked back on it, I had actually developed a corporate strut. When that becomes part of your way, you don't lose the capacity or the facility to make good judgments, but that capacity is dimmed or diminished.' He also regrets that 'the blinkers were on' during his tenure as Paddy Power chairman, when he says his old curiosity was subsumed by passive subscription to corporate Ireland, blinding him to the societal consequences of gambling. Efforts to regulate the industry are 'nowhere near tough enough' , he says. 'I was a good chairman in the sense that I helped the company grow. But I was horrified when I looked back, and I wished I'd never been chairman.' [ From the archive: Banking inquiry: Drury's evidence was worth the wait Opens in new window ] The memoir, as well as his articles for The Irish Times and business publication The Currency, gave him a 'certain level of confidence' that he could write, though he has been reluctant to call himself a journalist again. 'There was a discussion with [Catastrophe publishers] Merrion Press about how to describe me on blurbs, and initially I was kind of resistant to that, because I think I have an old-fashioned sense of what a journalist does,' he says. (The blurb says he 'returned to journalism' in 2016 but introduces him as 'an author and opinion writer'.) The principles of his news years are deeply rooted, nonetheless. When he says he watches 'really good interviewers' flail amid the 'stonewalling, stonewalling, stonewalling' of Israel's spokespeople, I ask if he thinks it is correct to invite them on air when this outcome can be anticipated. 'I would have suffered the constraints of Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act, and I don't believe in censorship. I am strongly of the view that censorship of any description is not of value. So I think it is better to attempt to interview them, and every so often you might make a little breakthrough,' he says. 'I think their own Sphinx-like intransigence, and same old weary lines, reinforces to most of the audience – which is more intelligent than we ever give them credit for – that that's what it is.' Sport being the other through line of his life – he played soccer for UCD – Drury is now chairman of not-for-profit Sport Against Racism Ireland. 'The work of any NGO, trying to get funds, is hard,' he says, adding that he would like to see the Government 'crack the whip' so the private sector does more. 'A lot of private-sector companies benefiting from migration aren't investing any money at all in supporting initiatives that make migrants feel part of our community, feel cared for, feel respected, and that's a real shame. I would much rather you include that than any bolloxology about Fintan Drury.' Catastrophe: Nakba II by Fintan Drury is published by Merrion Press
Irish Times
an hour ago
- Irish Times
Quarter of Irish ‘EU presidency' meetings to be held outside Dublin
Most of the big political events hosted in the State during Ireland's time holding the presidency of the council of the European Union next year will take place in Dublin. Ireland is due to take over the important deal-making role within the EU for the second half of next year, which will see Government ministers become responsible for pushing EU policy forward. Ministers and senior diplomats will chair a large number of meetings, in Brussels and Ireland, where they will be expected to steer the other 26 national governments towards compromise agreements on various decisions and pieces of legislation. Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Harris is expected to brief Cabinet next week about the ongoing preparations for the influential EU role. READ MORE It is understood that 22 meetings of ministers from all EU states will be hosted in Ireland, along with a big summit of European leaders, which will be a huge logistical undertaking. [ Irish officials step up plans for rotating EU presidency, which will cost more than €150m Opens in new window ] About a quarter of the Cabinet-level meetings will be held outside Dublin, Mr Harris is expected to tell Cabinet colleagues next week. The estimated cost of hosting the EU presidency has yet to be finalised, but it is likely to be about €170 million, according to two sources. The Government is keen to make sure there is some regional spread of events across the country. Work to refurbish State-owned venues that will be used to host high-level meetings, such as Dublin Castle, is already under way. Several other venues have been block-booked for the six-month period. A meeting of all EU finance ministers at Dublin Castle was the largest event during Ireland's last stint running the council presidency in 2013. This time around the biggest event will be a summit of nearly 50 European heads of state and government, a relatively new forum known as the European Political Community. It will be held back to back with a separate meeting of the 27 EU leaders. The venue for the summit has not been confirmed. Hosting the summit of European leaders, as well as more regular meetings of EU ministers, will pose an unprecedented security and planning challenge for the State, according to an internal Government briefing. The briefing, seen by The Irish Times, said An Garda Síochána and the Department of Justice were still working out the likely costs of securing the high-profile political events during the EU presidency. A changed security landscape and the more complex nature of potential threats would be a feature of the planning, the briefing said. Irish Ministers have begun to travel to Brussels more regularly for meetings, to build up closer working relationships with their counterparts from other EU states. A rota is to be drawn up so that at least one Irish Minister will also attend the monthly voting sessions of the European Parliament from September onwards, to develop contacts with senior figures in the parliament. Running a successful EU council presidency will be 'essential for Ireland's position, influence and reputation' in the union, a separate Department of An Taoiseach briefing stated. The briefing, dated March 27th and released under the Freedom of Information Act, said Ireland would be expected to play an 'honest broker' role during EU policy debates. Topics that would likely be high on the agenda included defence, migration, climate, economic competitiveness, CAP reform and negotiations to decide the size of the next EU budget, the briefing said. Work is ongoing to map out what policy areas the Government will prioritise during the six-month window where it holds the EU council presidency next year.
Irish Daily Mirror
2 hours ago
- Irish Daily Mirror
Irish Government ‘willing to consider helping further' on Casement, Harris says
The Irish Government is 'willing to consider helping further' with the development of Casement Park, deputy premier Simon Harris has said. It comes after a UK Government pledge of £50 million (€58m) for the development of the west Belfast GAA stadium was included in Chancellor Rachel Reeves' spending review. However, that pledge still leaves the project far from its funding target under current plans. Mr Harris said it is up to the Northern Ireland Executive to decide how to proceed but said the Irish Government would be 'very helpful' in getting the stadium built. Plans for a 34,000-capacity stadium at the site have been mired in uncertainty because of a major funding gap. Stormont ministers committed £62.5 million (€73.4) to Casement in 2011, as part of a strategy to revamp it along with football's Windsor Park and the rugby ground at Ravenhill. While the two other Belfast-based projects went ahead, the redevelopment of Casement was delayed for several years because of legal challenges by local residents. The estimated cost spiralled in the interim. Last September the UK Government ended hopes that the west Belfast venue would host Euro 2028 games, when it said it would not bridge a funding gap to deliver the redevelopment in time. As well as the Stormont contribution of £62.5 million (73.4m), the Irish Government has offered €50m (roughly £42 million) and the GAA has pledged to contribute at least £15 million (€17.6m) It has been reported that the cost of the project has fallen to £270 million (€320m) since it was confirmed the ground would not host Euros matches. Under current plans and including the £50 million (€58.7)from Wednesday's announcement along with the other commitments, the funding shortfall stands at roughly £100 million (€117m). Asked on Friday whether the Irish Government would give an increased contribution, Mr Harris said: 'We're certainly willing to consider helping further, but I should say the Irish Government has already made a very significant willingness to contribute in relation to Casement. 'I welcome the fact that the British Government has joined us in that effort this week, as of course has the GAA. 'The Northern Ireland Executive – and I would have made this point to the First and deputy First Minister today – they obviously now need to decide how they wish to pursue and of course, the Irish Government will want to be very helpful in getting this built.' He told RTE's News At One radio programme: 'This is really, really, really important for the provision of sports facilities, and we will continue to engage constructively.' Speaking at the British Irish Council in Northern Ireland, Taoiseach Micheal Martin said Ireland had already made an 'unprecedented contribution' to the project through the Shared Island Fund. He added a 'realistic' framework for the project was needed. 'Now is the time really to try and reach an agreement in terms of how we proceed with the stadium, having a realistic sort of sense of the framework that would govern the construction of the stadium here because it's been idle for far too long, and I think there's an opportunity now to get a stadium built.' Meanwhile, DUP MLA Sammy Wilson accused Northern Ireland Secretary Hilary Benn of 'clear bias' by allocating money to the GAA rather than providing 'equal treatment of all sports'. Mr Wilson added: 'And in doing so, imposing on the Northern Ireland Executive to find a further £100m to £150m on top of what is already allocated to GAA.'
